Blathering on (again)

I seem to have given some of you the impression that I have toiled and toiled, doing Daywork my whole life, and have given it up only yesterday for the life of the pen. In the interest of honesty, I feel compelled to rectify these impressions.

I have worked mostly from home for the past three years. I am sometimes lured from my domicile by a nearby company, where I once ran the department in which I now occasionally serve. I didn't work out as the manager. I fought a lot with my superiors, and when I got tired of fighting, I became lax in fulfilling my obligations.

That is all water under the bridge.

GoodThomas suggested that I point out that I have never worked. This is also not true, and he better have been kidding when he said that.

As for the writing, I made a promise to myself last July to give this a legitimate shot. I hadn't written in paragraphs much for more than a decade before that. My promise took the form of a five-year plan, in which the goal for the first year was simply to write and write and not worry about publishing or anything else.

I felt I needed at least a year to to remember how to make words rub against one another in such a way as to cause meaning to spill forth.

I'm sure when my year is up, I shall feel I could really use another year to remember these things. I'm pretty sure I'll always be working on that particular problem.

I was considered a "natural" writer when I was in school, and somewhere in there, my teachers failed to impart to me any of the discipline I am now trying to create for myself. This is not the fault of the teachers, at whom I sneered and scoffed as much as I could get away with. I hardly ever completed the assignments they set in front of me. Where the fault lies with them, it is only that they did not fail me more often. The rest is all on me. I am well aware that I robbed myself of a pretty good education.

So now I set assignments for myself. I've been at least mediocre with my follow-through. I completed a novel in November as a participant in NaNoWriMo. Before that, I had no way of knowing if I could write about something and sustain even my own interest in a single set of characters and ideas for that many pages, for that long a time. While I am not exactly enamored with the output from that exercise, I do think that I learned a lot. Not the least of which is that I can, indeed, write a novel-length piece, however turgid and excruciating.

Completing the Daywork has me thinking about all of this all over again. Now is my time to write, to put my money where my mouth is, as it were. Or my something where my something else is.

I've been trying to reawaken my more playful mind, and am giving myself a week to decompress before I start expecting any sort of real output on the novel.

But, listen: I wrote a short story today. It is bad, but it is a first draft. First drafts do not need to sparkle. I hadn't really intended to do even this much, but I'm happy I did.

In my adult life, I have been an actor, a musician, a graphic artist and many other things. I was even an accountant. I have expressed myself creativity since I can remember.

I finally stopped acting about seven years ago, because my band had become infinitely more interesting to me. I stopped being in a band because it had started to feel like Dayworking. Writing is my Last Big Dream, and the only one I have never really followed. It is also the one in which I can most easily see where I am succeeding and where I am failing. Each art I have discarded (I don't think I've really discarded any of them forever) has been in pursuit of the more challenging option at the time.

There is nothing more challenging, to my mind, than grabbing a stranger and making him or her feel things with nothing more than the alphabet. To take someone on a ride with such meager tools is an accomplishment indeed, and I salute all of the writers who have taken me on such journeys. This list will undoubtedly include some of you Blogreaders, those of you with blogs, anyway. I had thought blogs were a bit silly right up to (and a little past) the point where I started one myself as a writing exercise. Thank you for proving me wrong.

See how quickly I lose the point? I came here to tell you that I was only a Dayworker for about three months this time, and all my crowing about being unshackled and free may as well be the sound of the wind blowing. My present circumstances and freedom to write are merely the product of circumstance and luck, whose unwitting pawn I shall ever be.